Is there a better alternative? I don’t see anything conclusive in the link on that front
It’s like a politician, “Look how bad the others are” and then not proposing anything better (because at this moment, there isn’t).
I sure don’t know. SimpleX is suggested, among others: https://dessalines.github.io/essays/why_not_signal.html#good-alternatives
That could work, it looks like it was a lot of features like reacts and video calls. How easy it is to setup and ‘plug-and-play’ will determine whether I’ll be able to convince people to use it
It is still in early stages but the bones are good.
I would not advise for people who expect shit to just work.
Maybe next year. A lot of progress since last time I tried it.
Could you explain/elaborate to a know-nothing (me) on the following from your link?:
Caveats of federation: Metadata leaking
When using federation, Matrix’s room states (containing a lot of Metadata) get replicated and stored indefinitely on every homeserver any user connects with or connects to. While this is a feature for enabling distributed chat rooms, it comes at a serious privacy cost.
To avoid this, you can either disable federation, or make sure that your users signed up with no linkable identifiers other than their user names.
The author of that essay (@dessalines@lemmy.ml) is one of the main devs of lemmy, so you’re asking in the right place lmao
I’ve never looked into how Matrix works at all, so I can’t really speak to that.
Matrix is not really a chat system, but rather a distributed database that pretends to be a chat system. As a result all servers participating in a room get a full copy of the room metadata all the way back to when the room was created, which is a serious privacy issue.
This is not a general problem of federated systems though, and XMPP for example basically only shares the metadata that other participating servers strictly need to function.
How…do you think chat systems with storage are supposed to work? They store data. In a database
What specific fields are shared by matrix but not xmpp?
The main difference is that in Matrix, a chat’s history and media is stored indefinitely on every participating server, while on XMPP it’s only the duty of the one “hosting” it. And to my understanding, in 1-to-1 chats, the server doesn’t even retain the messages after delivering them, since there’s a separate module for “syncing” the history between devices (that you can set the retention time for).
Yes in a local database, not a distributed one.
The main difference is that XMPP (like most other federated systems) is based on passing messages, so if a new server joins a chat, it gets send messages from that point onwards.
In Matrix that is different. When a new server joins a chat it exchanges the entire database for that chat, and for DAG consistency reasons this means all the metadata since the chat was first created, often years ago.
Conversations is very simple
- matrix if you want cloud storage for conversations
- jami or briar if you’re okay with p2p
- simplex for the most secure cryptography and “just works” better than p2p
Last time I tried SimpleX, you had to scan a QR code to go from Desktop to mobile and vice versa, any chance of them changing that? Otherwise it did look promising.
yeah you can only use one device at a time because simplex doesn’t have accounts, just devices. but you can make another account per device and add them to your chats
Wowww that’s bad design
yeah it’s annoying, but they’re pretty committed to the no user id thing
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Why do you claim simplex has the “most secure” crypto? Why is it more secure than the standard double ratchet everyone else uses?
